Wanna talk about potential for a massive date breach. This is it.
Beginning this summer, taxpayers who need to access the IRS website for information about their past taxes will need to create an account with identity verification company ID.me.
The IRS says in a statement “identity verification is critical to protect taxpayers and their information. The IRS has been working hard to make improvements in this area, and this new verification process is designed to make IRS online applications as secure as possible for people."
The IRS has stressed that individuals will not actually be required to go through ID.me or use facial-recognition software to submit their tax returns.
But taxpayers will still be forced to use this software in order to take advantage of some of the IRS' most basic tools.
Jackie Singh, director of technology and operations at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, points out that this decision “will only lead to further ruin for Americans when their data is inevitably breached.